Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

in conversation with Lynne Sharon Schwartz

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An agonizing turbulence lies just beneath the surface of this skillfully wrought novel by the French phenom who caused a sensation with the publication of her novel Incest.


Reaching back into a world before she was born, Christine Angot describes the inevitable encounter of two young people at a dance in the early 1950s: Rachel and Pierre, her mother and father. Their love is acute. It twists around Pierre's decisive judgments about class, nationalism, and beauty, and winds its way towards dissolution and Christine's own birth. Though it's Pierre whose ideas are most often voiced, it's Rachel who slowly comes into view, her determination and patience forming a radiant, enigmatic disposition. Equal parts subtle and suspenseful, An Impossible Love is an unwavering advance toward a brutal sequence of events that mars both Christine's and Rachel's lives. Angot the author carves Angot the narrator out of this corrosive element, exposing an unmendable rupture, and at the same time offering a portrait of a striking, ineradicable bond between mother and daughter.

CHRISTINE ANGOT is one of the most controversial authors writing today in France. Since the 1999 publication of Incest, Angot has remained at the center of public debate and has continued to push the boundaries of what society allows an author to express. Born in 1958 in Châteauroux, Angot studied law at the University of Reims and began writing at the age of 25. Her literary works have received prizes including the Prix France Culture in 2005 (for Les Désaxés and Une partie du cœur), the Prix Flore in 2006 (for Rendez-vous) and the Prix Sade in 2012 (for Une semaine de vacances), which she refused on the grounds that the theme of the prize did not correspond to the book she had written. In 2015 she won the Prix Décembre for her novel Un Amour impossible. Angot is now also a commentator on the television show On n’est pas couché.

ARMINE KOTIN MORTIMER is the translator of Philippe Sollers’s Mysterious Mozart (University of Illinois Press, 2010) and his Casanova the Irresistible (Illinois, 2016), as well as Julia Kristeva’s The Enchanted Clock (Columbia University Press, 2017). Excerpts from her translations of Sollers’s novels have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, AGNI, The Brooklyn Rail, The Cossack Review, and Asymptote. Her long career as a professor of French literature occasioned many scholarly books and articles, as well as recognition by the French government with the Palmes Académiques in 2009.

LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ is the author of over 28 books, including the novels Disturbances in the Field, leaving Brooklyn, and Rough Strife, which was nominated for a National Book Award.  She's also written several books of poetry and essay collections. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National ENdowment for the Arts.  She currently teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

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An Impossible Love: An Afternoon with Armine Kotin Mortimer and Lynne Sharon Schwartz